A New Website For a People’s Magazine Like No Other
Psychologies is a site dedicated to personal development, with content to help readers invest and understand their relationships, friendships mental health, and physical well-being.
Here’s how we breathed new life into their user experience to create a website that better reflects their brand.
Introduction
About the client
Grown up, intelligent and intimate, Psychologies seeks to enrich the emotional life of its audience. Offering a unique women’s lifestyle package, the magazine mixes inspiring personal development features with A-list interviews and articles on relationships, family, travel, food, fashion, beauty, health and wellbeing.
Introduction
Challenges we’ve tackled
Our team takes a unique approach to everything we touch, inside and out. From our culture and mentality to our projects and clients, we do everything with one goal in mind: To make your product more performant towards your goals.
Here are the specific areas we set out to improve for Psychologies through the design portion of the project.
Site performance
Improve site speed performance, optimizing for a user base that is generally accessing through mobile.
Monetization
Psychologies wanted to create a new membership for coaches to subscribe and create content.
Engagement
Improve engagement and user retention, laying the foundations for organic discoverability growth.
Fresh Look & Feel
Create a new design language that properly reflects Psychologies vision as their brand evolves.
“Everyone involved in our project has been excellent — XWP’s team has a real depth of talent.”
Steve Jones – Head Of Digital at Kelsey Media
Introduction
How We Helped
With our goals clear, we mapped out a process that would help revolutionize Psychologies’ digital offering, remedying all of the pain points felt by its user base while empowering their internal teams with a slick new publishing system.
Discovery
Through an exploratory process called Discovery, we worked with Psychologies to understand their core goals, and looked for ways to meet them.
UI and Interaction
We made improvements to Psychologies’ design language, creating an experience that was as beautiful, functional, and interactive.
Consultancy
Leveraging our team’s deep WordPress expertise, we helped Psychologies identify new areas of growth through their updated digital platform.
Development
Our performance engineers brought our designs to life, creating a lightening-fast user experience that’s a pleasure for all parties to use.
“Happiness is the only thing that multiplies when you share it.”
Albert Schweitzer
Research & Discovery
Mapping the Process
During Discovery, we created a timeline for the proposed design improvements. Wireframing would begin in mid-October so that a fully-tested product could launch in March.
Resarch & Discovery
Audience Personas
We worked with Psychologies extensively to build a developed understanding of just who their user base is. This was a crucial step in developing a solution that fully met their audience needs.
Has a family history of health issues, potentially including depression or breast cancer.
Proactively working on emotional and mental wellness, but needs more advice and inspiration.
Comes from a family where destructive habits such as alcoholism have impacted relationships.
Young professional with a moderate budget for investing in their health and wellbeing.
Is in a social or professional position where they are frequently asked for wellbeing advice.
Gym-goer, interested in advice on maintaining good habits and health-food trends.
Research & Discovery
Audience Analysis
We undertook a full heuristic evaluation of the Psychologies site, measuring the usability of the existing UI with independent walkthroughs and issue exploration.
Design
Wireframing and Prototyping
With a complete understanding of Psychologies, their users, their competition, and their goals, we ‘put pen to paper’, creating wireframes and prototypes of their new and improved UI.
Design
Foundations, and components
With the wireframes approved, we started the creation of individual components and foundational systems. This involves setting things like type and colour palette, as well the visual approach for reusable blocks.
Design
Here Comes the User Interface
Time to put it all together! Our team then created an aesthetically pleasing user interface, where Psychologies users could browse content with speed and control—bringing performance to their personal development. This was the final piece of the puzzle for our developers to start their work.
